Felix Adler

German-born American philosopher and ethicist

• Born: August 13, 1851
• Birthplace: Alzey, Hesse-Darmstadt (now in Germany)
• Died: April 24, 1933
• Place of death: New York, New York

Adler founded the Ethical Culture movement, whose goal was to overcome the divisions created by religious creeds and unite all people in ethical deeds.

Early Life

Born in what is now Germany, Felix Adler came to the United States at the age of six when his father, Rabbi Samuel Adler, accepted the country’s most prestigious Jewish Reform pulpit at Temple Emanu-El in were chosen. Samuel had been active in Europe in both secular struggles for freedom and religious reform. His passion for social justice was wedded to a love of scholarship. The Adler home was filled with books. Indeed, one of the best collections of Judaica in New York was to be found there. Felix’s mother engaged in the works of charity characteristic of the life of the Jewish community. Felix accompanied her as she visited the poor and the sick. She was no doubt one of Felix’s earliest examples of the power of the good deed.

The young Adler saw the socioeconomic problems that accompanied industrialization. In the second half of the nineteenth century, immigrants were swelling the populations of U.S. cities and crowding into slum areas, where they were exploited by industrialists and politicians.

Adler’s boyhood was punctuated by the sounds of the Civil War. When he was thirteen years old, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; Adler later said that this occasion was the first time that he had seen tears in his father’s eyes. His adolescence paralleled the post-Civil War era, when the calls to abolish slavery gave way to Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

Adler entered Columbia College at fifteen years of age and graduated in 1870, after which he was sent to Germany to study with Abraham Geiger in preparation for a career in the Reform rabbinate. When a lengthy delay in the school’s opening undercut that plan, Adler turned to university studies in Berlin and Heidelberg; he received a doctorate in Semitics from Heidelberg in 1873.

Upon returning to the United States, Adler was expected to succeed his father as chief rabbi at Emanu-El, but his university studies in Germany precipitated a break with Judaism. After being exposed to historical and critical studies of the Bible, evolutionary theory, anthropology, and neo-Kantianism, Adler could no longer maintain his former beliefs. He rejected the idea of a personal God and concentrated instead on a universal moral good, which he saw as a metaphysical reality. Because he had not followed his expected career track, Adler needed a new vocation. He inaugurated a Sunday lecture movement on May 15, 1876. In February of the following year, this movement was incorporated as the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Life’s Work

After the New York Society for Ethical Culture was incorporated, Adler was employed as its lecturer. In Adler’s mind, the society was a religious organization that transcended creeds and united people in ethical deeds. Its philosophic linchpin was a belief in the inherent worth of each individual, a belief that Adler had drawn from German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s assertion that all human beings were ends in themselves. Members of the society were to abide by three basic goals: sexual purity for males as well as females, donation of surplus income to the improvement of the working classes, and continued intellectual development.

The society included among its members workers and housewives, businesspeople and teachers, professionals and tradespeople. Among its most influential members were Joseph Seligman, a founder of the banking house of J. and W. Seligman and Company, and one of the wealthiest men in the country; Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor ; and Henry Morgenthau, who assisted in establishing the Ethical Culture School and in securing the site for the meetinghouse of the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park Avenue West in New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century.

As important as Adler’s weekly lectures were in laying the philosophic bases of the society, they were obviously not sufficient for a movement centered on the importance of performing ethical deeds. Adler and his followers did not shirk the responsibilities of their commitment to such ethical action. During the late 1870’s, they founded the first free kindergarten east of the Mississippi River in New York City, established a district nursing program (forerunner of the Visiting Nurse Service), and launched a tenement house building company. The Workingman’s School was organized in 1880. In 1882, Adler became a member of the New York State Tenement Housing Commission. In 1883, he and Edmond Kelly founded the Good Government Club to oppose political corruption in the city.

During the 1880’s, Adler and his followers established Ethical Culture Societies in Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis. These societies worked toward the reform of faith through active participation in modern communities, the reconstruction of society through ethical religion, and the moral growth of the individual through interaction with other people in the process of “ethicizing” society.

After 1890, Adler became better known in the international arena. He founded the International Journal of Ethics in 1890 (still published today as Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political and Legal Philosophy by the University of Chicago). The Ethical Culture movement also became international with the founding of societies in most of the countries of Western Europe as well as in Japan. In 1896, an International Ethical Union was established through which Adler helped to develop the International Moral Education Congresses in 1908. In 1911, he and Gustave Spiller established the first International Races Congress. In 1923, he gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, which were published as The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal in 1924. He also gave another series of talks at Oxford on the reconstruction of education.

Even as the European setting was pushing Adler toward new endeavors, events in the United States were raising troubling questions in his mind. Adler moved to the forefront of those who, in the name of American ideals, were increasingly critical of U.S. imperialism. From 1898 onward, he began to raise the issue of what he came to call the “national crisis.” Adler saw Central and Latin American adventurism as the beginning of the crisis and World War I as the climax. The problem lay in the incompatibility of two American myths: manifest destiny and spiritual democracy . If the United States was to become an ethical model, the nation had to first set itself right. Illusions of American self-righteousness had to be revealed for what they were, and a clear commitment needed to be made to spiritual democracy and against the imperialism of manifest destiny.

As the twentieth century dawned, increasing attention to minority rights began to characterize Adler’s thought. Labor and child labor in particular had interested him for a long time. The influence of the Civil War and Lincoln reappeared in his concern with the question of racial justice. Although he opposed the popular movement for equal rights for women, he did so on the grounds that the problem could not be dealt with merely by a superficial adjustment of social forms such as voting. He did support the rights of women to have careers but also saw in motherhood a vocation equal in its claims to other vocations.

From about 1890 until the end of his life in 1933, Adler developed a philosophy of industrial culture. The struggle for the rights of labor was meeting with violent repression. Economic depression was joined with political unwillingness to deal with the problems. In this setting, Adler, together with Crawford Howell Toy of Harvard University and Henry Carter Adams of Michigan, founded the Summer School of Applied Ethics at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1891. William James, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams taught courses there, among others. In 1894, Adler gave a series of twelve lectures on the labor question. The clue to the reconstruction of industrial society, Adler believed, was the development of vocational opportunities for every member of society. Vocation, the commitment of a person to meaningful work, was the way in which the attribute of inalienable human worth gained realistic content in an industrial society.

As Adler thought through his philosophy of industrial democracy, he was led inevitably to a reconsideration of schooling. His interest in education had manifested itself as early as the founding of the Workingman’s School in 1880. During the 1890’s, a concept of “organic” education was germinating in his mind, which led to a curriculum that integrated classical studies, modern science, industrial arts, and ethics. During the 1920’s, Adler began to dream more dramatically about a major new step in education, and in 1926 he formulated his ideals for the new school as one in which values were preeminent and specifically brought into the realm of commerce and business. The result was the Fieldston School, launched in 1928. On April 24, 1933, Adler died in New York City after a long struggle with cancer.

Significance

The potential relevance of Felix Adler for modern times is great. In his own life, he overcame the perennial tension between the life of thought and the life of action, and his struggle to point out an ethical path in a world that was becoming increasingly pluralistic and increasingly secular is, if anything, even more timely now than it was during his lifetime. Sadly, however, Adler has been largely ignored by history. Although the Ethical Culture Societies still exist, the knowledge that most members have of Adler is limited to the bare fact that he was their founder. His penetrating and original philosophy has seldom been studied or even referenced by more recent philosophers. The reforms in social welfare, politics, and labor relations in which he played such an important role continue, but their benefactors are largely unaware of Adler’s part in their development.

Perhaps his life was simply too well rounded for specialists to notice him. Philosophers considered him suspicious because he did not hold himself aloof from social reform efforts or religion. Activists, on the other hand, thought he was too much of a thinker. Perhaps he has suffered the fate of being considered irrelevant to later time periods because he was so immersed in the issues of his own historical period. For example, even his relatively well known work in the field of education is perceived as being too unattuned to modern psychologized education to be totally acceptable. Among religionists, he has suffered a similar fate, being neither absolute enough for the neoorthodox nor sufficiently disdainful of absolutes to find a place among situation ethicists. However, this man who was known as an exceptionally gifted pedagogue while he was alive still has much to teach later generations. Both his life and his thought deserve to be resurrected.

Bibliography

Beard, Annie E. S. Our Foreign-Born Citizens. 6th ed. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. The chapter on Adler gives a very simple introduction to his thought. The narrative is peppered with some excellent quotations from Adler’s works, but the sources of the citations are not given, frustrating any serious scholar of Adler.

Ericson, Edward L. The Humanist Way: An Introduction to Ethical Humanist Religion. Foreword by Isaac Asimov. New York: Continuum, 1988. A discussion of the Ethical Culture movement and the older tradition of humanism from which the movement evolved. Recounts the history of the movement from its birth in 1876 through its subsequent growth, and explains the basic tenets of Ethical Culture.

Friess, Horace L. Felix Adler and Ethical Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. This book, written by Adler’s son-in-law, provides personal memories of Adler in addition to more objective biographical information. Also offers an insightful analysis of Adler’s intellectual evolution.

Guttchen, Robert S. Felix Adler. New York: Twayne, 1974. Guttchen analyzes Adler’s ethical and educational ideas, with Adler’s concept of human worth presented as the linchpin of his philosophy. The philosophical analysis is preceded by a very useful chronology and a fine biographical sketch.

Kraut, Benny. From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979. Kraut analyzes Adler’s religious evolution and the Jewish reaction to Adler and the Ethical Culture movement. This very useful study focuses on the early evolution of Adler’s thought up until about 1880.

Neumann, Henry. Spokesmen for Ethical Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1951. Provides a simple introduction to Adler as the founder of Ethical Culture and to the leaders who followed him. Neumann attempts to present both a history of the movement through the lives of its leaders and a sympathetic (if not evangelistic) explanation of the movement’s purpose and worth.

Radest, Howard B. Felix B. Adler: An Ethical Culture. New York: P. Lang, 1998. Describes Adler’s proposals for a more democratic moral ideal and how this ideal could reform work, education, and politics.